Hey again, I've just got back from Rockhampton and am taking a break from trying to catch up on everything I've missed. Uni's starting to get crazy busy with mid-semesters looming (I have 4). A while ago we went to visit the VISY recycled paper factory, which was really interesting. It was my first uni field trip (if you don't include last semester's 15 minute trip to the distillation column in the chemical engineering building, which I don't). We saw the paper being sorted from other recycled material, pulped with water, then sent through a number of cleaning and drying processes before being flattened out into new paper. Of course, guide's explanation of the process was a bit more complicated than that...
So now I'm working in a group to do a mass balance on the entire plant and work out how they can reduce their water use. A mass balance is when you work out how much water and paper is going in and out of each part of the plant. It's so much more complicated than I thought it would be, but we're all really glad to be doing something practical rather than pure maths and science.

Today was the careers expo at UQ and (besides getting a bunch of freebies including a pen with a compass, a usb, 3 waterbottles, a pedometer and, oddly enough, a live plant) I met heaps of people from construction, consulting and environmental management companies. The expo was for everyone, but at least a quarter of the companies were engineering ones. Funny story (kind of), I had to fight the lady with the plants to get one because she said "They're only for environmental students" and then when I said I was an environmental engineering student, she didn't believe me. Eventually, after I'd shown enough interest in her company to convince her that I really was an environmental student, I got the plant :). Apparently lots of randoms had been pretending they studied environmental science/engineering to get one. It's one of those cool fleshy-leaved ones, it's called an Echeveria Golden Glow. Anyways, signing off...